THE ASCENT OF THE BODY 77 



additions, of room being added to room, of organ 

 to organ, of faculty to faculty. The general pro- 

 cess, also, by which this takes place is almost as 

 clear to modern science as in the case of material 

 buildings. A special class of observers has care- 

 fully watched these secret and amazing meta- 

 morphoses, and so wonderful has been theii 

 success with mind and microscope that they can 

 almost claim to have seen Man's Body made. 

 The Science of Embryology undertakes to trace 

 the development of Man from a stage in which 

 he lived in a one-roomed house — a physiological 

 cell. Whatever the multitude of rooms, the millions 

 and millions of cells, in which to-day each adult 

 carries on the varied work of life, it is certain 

 that when he first began to be he v/as the simple 

 tenant of a single cell. Observe, it is not some 

 animal-ancestor or some human progenitor of Man 

 that lived in this single cell — that may or may 

 not have been — but the individual Man, the present 

 occupant himself. We are dealing now not with 

 phylogeny — the history of the race — but with 

 ontogeny — the problem of Man's Ascent from his 

 own earlier self. And the point at the moment 

 is not that the race ascends ; it is that each 

 individual man has once, in his own life-time, occu- 

 pied a single cell, and starting from th^t humble 



